Buyers face unexpected red flag on Zillow homes

04 May 2026, 20:20 · The Fresno Bee

For Americans starting their real estate journey, the path often begins by opening Zillow, scrolling listings, and hunting for deals. The platform has become a default starting point for new and casual investors, along with everyday homebuyers.

That starting point is more important in 2026 than it has been in years. With mortgage rates higher than many hoped they'd be at this stage, and affordability not getting any better, the housing market has shifted in a way that makes finding good deals more difficult than it was a few years ago.

While this shift has brought challenges, it has also created opportunities. More first-time buyers are entering the market looking for those openings, and many of them are starting their search on the same platform, scrolling through the same listings, and assuming the filters are doing more work than they actually are.

In an exclusive interview with TheStreet, BiggerPockets Chief Investment Officer Dave Meyer pushed back on that assumption. What buyers see on Zillow - and on every other listing site - is overwhelmingly not what they should be buying.

"You should avoid probably 95% of the properties that are out there," Meyer told TheStreet.

What Zillow is for real estate investors

Meyer's 95% claim sounds harsh on its face, and could be unexpected for rookie investors wondering where else to start their search. But the qualifier is what makes it accurate. He isn't saying 95% of homes on Zillow are bad properties, he's saying that percentage of listings don't pencil out as investments. That distinction is important, and it's what many new investors miss when assuming the platform's listings are pre-filtered for what they need.

"There are always a lot of properties that are for sale that just don't make good investments," Meyer told TheStreet. "They could be great homes, primary residences for someone, but they don't make good investments."

That gap between "good home" and "good investment" is where Zillow's filters can fall short for the investor demographic. Zillow sorts by price, location, bedroom count, square footage, and dozens of other useful criteria. None of those filters tell a buyer whether the property will produce cash flow, whether it has value-add upside, or whether the numbers work for a rental. That math has to come from the buyer.

Meyer's argument is not new. It also came up on a recent episode of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast with longtime investor Michael Zuber.

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"There's still garbage out there," Meyer said on the April 22 segment. "If you're just a casual observer and you go on Zillow, the majority is garbage and so people are getting discouraged."

As both Meyer and Zuber concluded on this episode, this does not make Zillow a useless tool or inherently bad platform, it just needs to be utilized properly for investors who want to cut through overpriced homes and find quality investment properties.

How buyers can use Zillow in 2026

If 95% of listings aren't worth pursuing, the natural follow-up is how to spot the 5% that are. Meyer's answer isn't to abandon Zillow or find a better platform, but he does reshape how it can be used as an effective tool in 2026.

"My favorite thing to recommend to people to do, to establish a daily habit that will help you become a better real estate investor, is something I call benchmarking," Meyer told TheStreet. "Basically, what you should be doing is looking at deals in your target market every day. I do it every single day, even when I'm not planning to buy something in the immediate future."

Looking at deals every day, whether on Zillow or another platform, builds the instinct for what an average property looks like in a given market. Over time, a buyer develops the ability to recognize when a deal is significantly above average, which is the only kind of deal Meyer believes investors should act on.

The operational version of this discipline is detailed by Zuber on the BiggerPockets podcast. He recommends building what is known among real estate investors as a "buy box" - a focused set of criteria narrow enough to produce roughly 20 to 40 active listings in a given market. The buy box should be unique to each investor, and narrow their searches down to a manageable number of properties.

"It should produce 20 to 40 active listings," Zuber said on the BiggerPockets podcast. "Anything less, it's too tight. Anything more, it's too much... It's a 20-minute activity."

Not only does this process save an investor time by reducing the amount of listings they are analyzing, but it also removes a significant portion of what does not work for their situation.

That said, the red flag Meyer raises on Zillow doesn't go away with this approach. Most of what shows up in this kind of search will still be wrong for an investor's purposes. But what changes is the buyer's ability to filter through it without getting discouraged or settling for an average deal, all while sharpening their eye for what can actually work.

Key takeaways for homebuyers using Zillow in 2026

Most listings aren't bad homes, they're bad investments: Many properties on Zillow work fine as primary residences but don't produce the cash flow or upside investors need.
Listing platforms aren't designed to filter for investors: Zillow, Redfin, and similar tools serve every kind of buyer. Investors have to apply their own filters, because no platform determines whether the numbers work as a rental.
Daily benchmarking is the answer, not avoiding Zillow: Meyer recommends looking at deals in a target market every day, even when not planning to buy. The discipline builds the instinct for what's average and what's significantly above average.
A focused buy box keeps the practice tractable: On the BiggerPockets podcast, longtime investor Michael Zuber recommends a buy box that produces 20 to 40 active listings, tight enough to learn but broad enough to find opportunities. Zuber says the practice takes about 20 minutes a day.
The goal is finding the 5%, not buying anything: Meyer says investors should only act on deals significantly above their market's average. The benchmarking practice is what makes that judgment possible in the first place.

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This story was originally published May 4, 2026 at 1:20 PM.